As we know from watching noir films and listening to true-crime podcasts, there’s no such thing as the perfect murder (though some perps really do seem to get away with it). Rope, a new adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 play that’s best known for inspiring the seemingly one-shot 1948 thriller from director Alfred Hitchcock, presents a very imperfect crime that mashes up its many antecedents to ultimately diminishing returns.
As in previous iterations, the story centers on two highly educated young men who decide to kill a well-heeled acquaintance for sport — or perhaps to test Nietzschean theories about living dangerously and asserting their superiority — and immediately throw a party whose guests include the victim’s father and a former professor who realizes too late that his pupils have taken far too seriously their late-night dorm-room detours into nihilism. (Jimmy Stewart played the prof-turned-sleuth on film.)
Playwright Gordon Greenberg takes a lot of liberties with Hamilton’s original script, some of which make perfect sense for a story nearly a century old. For one thing, subtext frequently becomes text. Our murderous couple, here named Garrett Stern and Nate Singer and portrayed by veteran TV twinks Cameron Monaghan (Shameless) and Corey Fogelmanis (My Life With the Walter Boys), are more explicitly linked to the real-life gay Jewish murderers who inspired Hamilton: the notorious Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, University of Chicago students who killed a 14-year-old boy from their tony neighborhood in Chicago’s Hyde Park in 1924.
The characters have always been gay-coded (they were played by queer actors John Dall and Farley Granger in the film), but here they get to exchange sloppy kisses and undress each other in the shadows of their well-appointed New York City apartment circa the mid-1950s (sparely designed by Derek McLane, with a Christmas tree curiously placed upstage, and dimly lit by Jeff Croiter). There’s even a reference to how Joseph McCarthy’s anti-gay, anti-communist crusade could squelch their post-Princeton professional ambitions.
Greenberg complicates matters by tossing additional elements into the mix: antisemitism, a love triangle involving the couple’s professor (played by Jason Butler Harner with a full wardrobe of pretentious affectations), a secret backstory about the professor that becomes leverage for blackmail, and an all-new bloody ending that delivers shock value but doesn’t make much sense. He also adds flashbacks and has each character deliver a superfluous, spotlighted direct address to the audience about their background and beliefs that are clear from the context of the surrounding scenes. All these flourishes mute whatever tension the show attempts to build during the ill-fated party.
In this version, Monaghan’s Garrett is not merely a dom who coaxes, scolds, and rewards his birdlike lover, Nate. He’s a full-on sociopath who’s additionally motivated by greed: He claims to be from Hyde Park but in fact hails from lower-class Skokie, and yearns for the wealth and status of his peers (his casually rich lover especially). Besting his supposed superiors seems to a real driving force for him, and Monaghan oozes a kind of malevolent charm that makes his motivations plausible. Fogelmanis is far less convincing as his fluttery partner in crime, standing or sitting placidly until he’s called upon to speak, which he typically does with snappish overreactions.
Elizabeth Gillies is a delight as the guys’ proto-fag-hag pal, committing dramatic larceny of her scenes with her witty delivery of asides that seem to be part of an entirely different show. She also tolerates the awkward advances of a dim-bulb Princeton classmate (played by real-life Princeton grad and The Good Wife alum Graham Phillips). James Waterston rounds out the cast as the well-connected judge who has a vague sense something’s not quite right but never suspects that the casket-shaped chest in the couple’s living room holds the corpse of his own son.
But this New Group production, under the direction of Scott Elliott, never achieves the compelling creepiness of the material’s previous iterations. What makes Hitchcock’s film such a cult favorite is not only the novelty of its subliminal gay messaging and the stagey set-up that made it appear to have been shot in one long take. It’s the exquisite suspense that Hitchcock built into the criminals’ audacity, the threat of exposure that might come at any moment. With all the flashbacks and spotlighted soliloquies to the audience, the tension in this Rope keeps going slack precisely when it should be tightening. ★★☆☆☆
ROPE
The New Group at Theater at St. Clement’s, Off Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through December 6 for $69 to $139 for $99